The Dartmouth Review 9.19.2008 Volume 28, Issue 1 (PDF)

Volume 29, Issue 1
September 19, 2008
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The Freshman Issue

What’s Inside:
• Best and Worst Profs • Courses of Note • Greek Life •
• Etiquette Guide • Lost Songs • History of the College •

Page  The Dartmouth Review September 19, 2008

Wants You!
The Dartmouth Review is Dartmouth’s only independent newspaper, and the oldest and
most renowned of over one hundred and twenty independent campus newspapers nationwide. Staff members of The Dartmouth Review have been published in the Boston
Globe, New York Times, Boston Herald, Washington Times, National Review, American
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a forum for students and alumni who dissent from prevailing orthodoxy. We invite you
to join us. Come steep yourself in campus culture and politics, Old Dartmouth, keen
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website designers, and anyone else who wants to learn from Dartmouth’s only school
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any time, or blitz editor@dartreview.com. Be sure also to join us for the:

Freshman Open House


The Dartmouth Review Office
Monday, September 22 5:00 pm

Free Indian Food
And Indian T-Shirts For ’12s
Who Reads The Dartmouth Review?

Mort Kondracke

J.C. Watts

Steve Forbes

Elizabeth Dole

Robert Novak

Bill Kristol

G. Gordon Liddy

Charlton Heston

Robert Bork

George Gilder

Ed Meese

September 19, 2008 The Dartmouth Review Page 

Founders

Greg Fossedal, Gordon Haff,
Benjamin Hart, Keeney Jones

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win
great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than
to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray
twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

Emily Esfahani-Smith
Editor-in-Chief

Weston R. Sager
President

Michael C. Russell
Executive Editor

William D. Aubin, Michael G. Gabel
Managing Editors

Mostafa A. Heddaya, Tyler Brace
Associate Editors

Nathan T. Mathis, Matthew C. Hartman
Publishers

Aditya A. Sivaraman
Vice President

Catherine D. Amble
Photography Editor

James T. Preston Jr., Maxwell L. Copello
Sports Editors

Nisanth A. Reddy
Web Editor

John M. Morris
Archivist

Contributors

Kathleen Carmody, Michael R. DiBenedetto, Donald L.
Faraci, Matthew D. Guay, Nicholas P. Hawkins, Cathleen G. Kenary, Cate Lunt, Elizabeth B. Mitchell, Brian
C. Murphy, David M. Shrub, Lane Zimmerman.

Mean-Spirited, Cruel and Ugly
Legal Counsel

The Review Advisory Board

Martin Anderson, Patrick Buchanan, Dinesh D’Souza,
John Fund, Jeffrey Hart, Laura Ingraham, Mildred Fay
Jefferson, William Lind, William Rusher,
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Sidney Zion
Hartman is dead to me.
Cover photograph courtesy of Dartmouth College
Library.
Special Thanks to William F. Buckley, Jr.
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Editorials
Lacessit Me: Operation Gadfly

The stupid party—that’s us if we’re to believe John Stuart
Mill’s take on conservatives. To a philosophy department
chairman from Duke University, the so-called stupidity
of conservatives explains their gapping absence from college campuses: “We try to hire the best, smartest people
available…. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are
generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives
we will never hire.” We wonder if admissions committees
employ similar reasoning to the students they admit.

But we don’t need the Duke professor’s loopy logic to
know the academy is loaded with liberals. The good news
is, Dartmouth tends to attract a rather moderate and pragmatic student body (the loons, as is their wont, are drawn
to Brown and Columbia); the bad news is, as Yeats says, the
most vocal students, professors, and administrators are full
of passionate intensity raging on the fringes of their leftist
ideologies, and they are the ones you hear and the ones who
dominate the “public conversation” on this campus. These
people, not easily contented, are certainly less than happy
with Dartmouth and what they see as the College’s infinite
problems: Greek life and its “patriarchic issues,” or the
campus’ “gender issues,” or its “classist issues,” or whatever
the “issue” du jour is…the possibilities are endless.

When a paper like ours challenges the malcontents’
incessant caterwauling and social engineering, they cry that
our humble paper is either sexist, or homophobic, or racist—or something worse, because there is always something
worse: that we tend conservative, for instance. Really, here
at The Review, we just love the school they tolerate, and
don’t want them to change Dartmouth into…Harvard.

Though, to the regret of our detractors, The Review
is neither sexist, homophobic nor racist, but we certainly
do not suffer moping fools gladly. The problem is, a college campus is perhaps the greatest locus of bumbling and
pretentious fools, the kind Socrates was constantly bitchslapping, questioning, and exposing as hypocrites and idiots,
often with hilarious results. We like to think we’re following
in his great tradition by playing the role of the gadfly. Of
course, Socrates died for his efforts—and though we hope
to have a happier end, we know it takes no small degree
of courage to take on the morose crazies, especially when
their hyperbolic cries of sexism, homophobia, racism, and
what-have-you seem to drown ours out. In that case, we just
talk among ourselves, crack a joke, and have a beer. This
is college after all, not the Cold War Hanover-style—and

humor and fun will always win more arguments than strident
rallies and protests.

But still, The Dartmouth Review has work to do, especially in the upcoming year, as the College searches for
a new president to replace James Wright, Dartmouth’s
current “make Dartmouth a research university in all but
name” president. If the administration and trustees, who
are orchestrating the search, try to continue the legacy of
President Wright in the new president, you can be sure we
at The Review will take them on…again. The problem with
President Wright, for the benefit of the freshmen who may
not know, was that he sought to dilute, and in some cases
eliminate, the qualities that make Dartmouth unique; in
fact, the very things that make Dartmouth, Dartmouth.

Despite what you have heard from administrators, alums,
or the DOC cabal that welcomed you to campus, The Dartmouth Review is not an organ of bigoted meanies—we are
simply a group of student-writers that love this college and
want to remind others why this place is so great. Granted,
we step on some toes, but to quote a former TDR editor,
“sometimes The Review has to go too far so that others will
go far enough.” That is our editorial motto in a nutshell.

Fleshed out, it means: we have a healthy skepticism
of do-gooder authority, with college administrators and
academic ideology ranking chief among such authority;
we respect and adhere to the traditions that have defined
the College, and make her what she is today, a place we all
love; change and novelty, for the sake of change and novelty
alone, are sources of anxiety to us; ideas that have been
tested and refined by time are of more value to us than the
flippant and ephemeral tantrums of trivial and angry college activists; we believe in a classical education, and we
call political correctness out for what it is across campuses
nationwide (see page 7); on a campus, where intellectual
elitism and snobbery can solidify into the order of the day,
we give space to the eternal voice crying in the wilderness.
Above all, we are guided by our love of Dartmouth and her
evergreen spirit—so we like to have a good time, and raise
some eyebrows while we’re at it.

If this sounds all right to you, freshmen, then we invite
you to join our ranks. To the budding writers, reporters,
thinkers, or those who want to stop by for some free food
and a good time: we welcome you first to Dartmouth, and
second to the voice of Dartmouth’s past and future: The
Dartmouth Review. Operation gadfly is underway.

The Right Kind of Change

When I was a freshman, I was caught up playing the
catch-up game. Many of my upperclassmen peers—at places
like The Dartmouth Review—were not only older than me,
but were smarter, better read and more informed than me.
They could hold their alcohol, while discussing the intricacies of the College’s alumni
governance controversies.
They could play pong on
a Thursday night and test
like champs the next Friday
morning. In the meantime,
my freshmen friends and I
struggled to hold down half
a can of Keystone Light. We
just couldn’t keep up.

But there were the freshmen who tried to keep up.
Some did. Some drank four
nights a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays),
played the social butterfly, or just played “social,” hooked
up with the older boys (if you were a freshman girl)—or
alternately, played video games, if you were a freshman
boy—and were above all happy, while managing to coast
through classes shooting in the 3.0s, as far as grades go. But
who thought about grades?

Those kids were the exceptions. There were the other
freshmen, who drank and got caught. Who drank, and felt
themselves carried away by Safety & Security, or, worse, in the
back of an ambulance. Or the freshmen girls who, insecure
and unhappy, quickly acquired eating disorders, or came to
be called “slam pieces,” as one frat derisively refers to them.
The freshmen boys usually had funnier stories—involving
urinating themselves, or “hosing,” and nudity. Less funny

are the ones who are consumed by it (and I don’t mean the
wetting of the pants): one freshman boy, whose trouble with
alcohol never ceased, told me, “my mother says she doesn’t
even know me anymore.” Chaos—that is freshman year.

It’s not just alcohol that changes you either, in a college there are also academics,
and activities, and new friends,
and, at some distant point, the
job search, and on and on it
goes. For many of you, being
an overachieving smarty-pants is
old news; being an overachieving smarty-pants who has the
drinking habits of a medicallydefined alcoholic, on the other
hand, is new stuff. Putting it all
together will no doubt cause you
to change in ways you hadn’t
imagined. Some will change for the better, others for the
worse. The trick is putting yourself in the first category.
That requires work, though, as all good things do.

You’ll no doubt receive an inordinate amount of advice
in the next few days, advice that you won’t take. Why not?
It takes experience, more than anything, to learn how to
navigate the seas of college. That’s what college is, after all.
Adjustment. Transition. Growth. Change. What’s the catchup game if not change, repeated, repeated, repeated—then
revised, until you’re caught-up? A fully mature adult. Or
something like it.

This change, the one I describe, is not reinvention,

By
Emily
EsfahaniSmith

Continued on page five...

Page  The Dartmouth Review September 19, 2008

The Week In Review
Equal Opportunity Fornication (with consent)!

Other Ivy League schools performed poorly as well, but only
Cornell approached the same special level as Dartmouth
by pulling a 121. Mysteriously, Princeton had managed the
first place in this new arbitrary algorithm as well. There was
no immediate inquiry into the possibility that Princeton is

Your summer may have been hot, but chances are it
simply held as the constant in the creation of new rankings
wasn’t as hot as consensual sex day; with t-shirts declaring
systems, but a few interesting items about the formula have
“Consensual Sex is Hot,” Dartmouth’s Center for Women
come to light. Forbes.com relied heavily on such illuminating details as the number of alumni and
faculty receiving national awards and the
amount of debt students accumulate during
enrollment. These criteria seem questionable enough, but the crown jewel was the
reliance on student evaluations from the
site RateMyProfessors.com; Dartmouth has
one of the lowest participation rates in the
site, and anybody who has passed a basic
statistics course might surmise that only
the particularly whiney take the time to visit
such obscure sites in the first place, adding a
bit of bias to the already tremendously low
sample size. The administration responded
with a few statistics of its own, but they probably need not have. Most alumni, students,
professors, (and probably a few administrators) know that Dartmouth has never quite
been quantifiable. So take heart, concerned
—Pea Green in a beanie, a lost tradition—
alumni; among meaningless numbers, this
one seems to be especially useless.
and Genders Studies wants to “raise awareness” about sexual
assault which is “not hot” as Paris Hilton would say. Every
summer, the Center organizes activities like “Pin the Clit
on the Vulva,” “Consensual Twister,” and “Condom Dart
Throw” as part of the charade known as “Consent Day,”

He went to Harvard Business School with President
held this year as a two-hour event on August 15, 2008. The
George W. Bush, so Goldman Sachs banker Ken Wilson
event climaxed with students (consensually) signing a pledge
was probably not surprised when his cell phone rang and
“to respect consent,” The Daily Dartmouth reports (August
a familiar Texas drawl told him that the United States of
19, 2008). Among the riveting issues addressed were: how
America needed his service. Ken Wilson agreed to retire
frequently men contemplate sex, how rats like to get it on,
to serve as advisor to former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry
and whether condom-fairies do in fact exist. Call us old
Paulson ’69, a man he has known since his days at the Colfashioned, but we at The Dartmouth Review shy away from
lege and who helped recruit Wilson to Goldman. The move
grouping “consensual sex” with “rats”; but in an age of equal
marks an unusual departure from the usual federal practice
opportunity fornication, we say: to each his own!
of appointing unqualified people to high positions and then
avoiding all responsibility after their inevitable failure; as it
turns out, Wilson is widely regarded as one of Wall Street’s
go-to bankers, and has helped his own firm avoid the costly
mistakes of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch during the
current crisis in the mortgage market.

Those of our readers who follow the financial news or

Not only did somebody at Forbes.com think it would
the apocalyptic hysteria that is the evening news will by now
be a good idea to get into the college-rankings business,
have heard about the Treasury’s takeover of Fannie Mae
but apparently the committee in charge of this particular
and Freddie Mac, and will no doubt be relieved to hear that
project decided to improve upon the virtually worthless
a man with at least a passing interest in, and talent for, the
tradition of numerical rankings by giving abysmal ratings
success of the free market has been chosen to give advice
to some of America’s most prestigious universities, sending
to the people who seem to feel government interference is
administrators into a tizzy all along the East coast. The Colonly limited by their own imaginations.
lege on the Hill fared particularly poorly, coming in at 127.

Treasury Taps Wilson ’69

Ratings Sleight-of-Hand
at Forbes.com

Trees Come Down, Hippies
And All

It’s not easy being in the business of enviro-justice these
days—just ask the hippies at Berkeley, who were recently
ejected from trees they climbed in protest. The hippies
were aggrieved that paradise would be paved in favor of a
newly-constructed football field. After twenty-one months
sitting in the trees that UC Berkeley planted as part of a
landscaping project in 1923, the final four protesters agreed
to climb down from the last redwood tree. As if the hippies
needed another reason to hate the football jocks…

The protest had been attracting fewer supporters and
more arrests of late, and was drawing scorn from the majority
of students, left, right and moderate alike. Some thought
that Berkeley, which is famous for making a fuss over this
war or that corporation, was made to look silly for protesting
a construction project with such gusto, when presumably
there are some legitimate environmental issues to be rallied for or protested against or whatever it is these people
do. The few students who do not identify as violently left
wing thought it a bit odd that this had not ended sooner,
since in most areas of the country, throwing bags of feces
at police officers, which the protestors did, results in arrest;
the lone conservative on UC Berkeley’s campus reportedly
chuckled, then pointed out that the university had been
barred from cutting the trees until recently because of an
injunction; the protest had literally accomplished nothing.
He then sighed, mumbled something about “safety school”
and began to sob.

Columbia Annexes
Neighboring Blocks, May
Reclaim Sudetenland

It seems eminent domain is not merely the last best
hope of sleazy real estate developers in New London, CT;
Columbia is getting into the game as well, threatening the
procedure in an effort to obtain most of the Manhattanville
section of Harlem. Of course, like most land grabbers in
similar situations, it does not bother Columbia or the politicians in New York that the land would not be seized for
public use, or that it was not a particularly blighted area
until the university started letting its local holdings go to
seed.

The students of Columbia are known for standing
up to their administration when it comes to causes that
are both abstract and of questionable social value; one
hopes that they have the time and space in their new
facilities to help out the locals that find themselves
displaced.

Stinson’s: Your BBQ HQ
Serving all your barbecue and pong needs
(603) 643-6086 | www.stinsonsvillagestore.com

 The Week In Review
An Emense Miscarriage of
Justice

The Review has covered the travels, trials and tribulations
of the Typo Eradication Advancement League on its worldfamous webpage, dartlog.net. But some news is too awful
in its ramifications to restrict to a single medium. Jeff Deck
and Benjamin Herson, Dartmouth Class of 2002 both, have
been banned from national parks for a year after accruing
vandalism charges in relation to the attempted correction of a
spelling mistake—“emense”—on a Grand Canyon sign. Deck
and Herson met in a creative writing class at the College,
but their nationwide crusade to improve collective literacy
with permanent markers, correction fluid, and other tools
of the trade did not get its start until after their graduation,
when Mr. Deck reportedly had an epiphany in the shower.
Since their beginnings, the duo has received ever-increasing
attention through their website and coverage in newspapers
across the country. Unfortunately, even their new celebrity
was not enough to save the pair from a stern prosecutor
and a court sympathetic to the eccentric spelling choices
of architects from the 1930s. It probably did not help that
the description of the “emense” rock formation was found
on a sign that is a National Historic Landmark in its own
right.

One hopes that a year-long proscription and $3,045
fine will not be enough to keep two of Dartmouth’s finest
from their enduring mission indefinitely.

Why Won’t They Stay?

After a disagreement with the College, the head coach
of Dartmouth’s five-time national champion figure skating
team, Loren McGean, resigned late in August. This follows
quickly upon the heels of Andy Harvard’s resignation. Har-

September 19, 2008 The Dartmouth Review Page 

vard, who was the director of the Outdoor Programs Office,
was much beloved by students, but allegedly forced out by
the machinations of the administration. McGean also took
issue with the administration, specifically and its treatment of
the figure skating team. When McGean formally complained
to the College about the lack of financial transparency in
how funds donated to the figure skating team were actually
being used, the administration did not address the problem.
McGean tells the Valley News, “To date these requests have
all been either ignored or denied” (August 27, 2008). As a
result, McGean left the College’s athletic program, taking
her talented coaching with her.

Dartmouth Churns Out
Groundbreaking Research

Approximately 12.5% of the 22 million American
children between the ages of 10 and 14 have seen a movie
that has been rated R for violence. As if that were not bad
enough, approximately 10 million of those little rascals have
seen one particularly egregious film, Scary Movie. Luckily
for the concerned families across the fruited plain, Dartmouth Medical School post-doctoral fellow Keilah A. Worth
has awoken the nation to the systematic failure of the film
ratings system to protect innocent youth, and the trail of
destruction this portends. James Sargent, the senior scientist
on the study, warns that “no expert in child development
would advocate for subjecting children as young as 10 to
this level of violence, yet the study shows that such exposure
is commonplace in this country” (Office of Public Affairs
Press Release, August 4, 2008). We at The Review were
initially horrified and fearful about the potential problems
that our younger siblings and cousins may cause, until we
noticed that the study used data from a survey conducted
in 2003, meaning that the age group in question included
some staffers. We regret nothing.

Editorial: continued from page three
...though, nor is it a conversion. Rather, it is the subtle and
deliberate, at times painstaking, movement from what you
are to what you want to be. What you should be. Chances
are, who you are will never be quite good enough, in the
grand scheme of things.

When you wrote your college essay, your guidance
counselor probably gave you the advice, “Be yourself.”

Please. You’ve got to be better than that.

But that’s not a call to arms; revolutionary change is
damaging in big and small things; creating a war-zone inside
yourself is a fools bargain filled with pain. Don’t change like
that: your mother should know you, recognize you, when
you go home for Thanksgiving. Rather, “Nice and easy does
it,” as Frank Sinatra says. We agree.

And the big changes don’t end with freshman year.
Prepare yourselves for the D-plan, which is change on
crack. The D-plan reduces life to three-month stints here,
there, and everywhere. Sophomore fall, you might join a
Greek house, make great new friends…and not see them
again for six months, as you go abroad to Barcelona, then
work for a term in New York.

Then there’s Sophomore summer, a touching-point for
your class. After the bliss that is Sophomore summer, maybe
you’ve made your best friends, maybe you’re dating someone,
and then wham. You might not see them until Junior spring,
or worse, Senior fall. Friendships dissolve, relationships
dwindle. You work hard to counter the D-Plan’s tendency
toward entropy, but feel drained on those last blurry-eyed
nights of each term, before you say goodbye—again—to a
different set of friends.

But it is all worth it, you realize, by the time senior year
rolls around. Like you freshmen, us seniors are here for the
full year, and are about to embark on our own adventures
soon. We will cherish our last year here as you cherish
your first. And though none of us are fully-matured adults,
we’re beginning to resemble something like it (that’ll be us
running around in our suits this fall, trying to beat the job
market)—and we wish you the best of luck playing your
personal catch-up game, as we finish playing ours.
n

Indian Fall Football Preview
By Maxwell L. Copello

After grueling two-a-day practices and countless hours
of preparation during fall preseason camp, the Dartmouth
Football Team is ready for an exciting 2008 season. The
Indians are returning 47 letter-winners including seven
starters on both offense and defense. Working to continue
the trend of improvement, the Indians have built their base
around tri-captains Alex Rapp (Offensive Tackle), Andrew
Dete (Middle Linebacker), and Milan Williams (Running
Back), and the strongest senior class in recent history. The
class of 2009 was the first under Head Coach Buddy Teevens’
reign and their final season marks the new beginning of
Dartmouth football.

Dartmouth opened up this season with a preseason
game against bitter rivals Harvard down in Cambridge on
September 12. This game was monumental for Dartmouth
football as it put the Indians on a more even playing field
with Colgate and other non-league opponents who will have
played at least three games before the Ivy League begins
play. Dartmouth starts regular season games on September

Mr. Copello is a senior at the College, Sports Editor of
The Dartmouth Review, and Nose Guard for the Indians.

20 when the Indians will travel to Hamilton, NY to face
Colgate University. The Indians are looking for revenge
after blowing a 28 point lead just a year ago. The Indians
open at home during the first week of classes on September
27 against in-state rivals University of New Hampshire in
the annual playing of the Granite Bowl. UNH, a perrenial
1-AA powerhouse, will make the short trip up to Hanover
with high expectations, but the Indians, who have improved
in the last few meetings, are looking to switch the scales of
power and regain bragging rights in our humble state. Home
games this season include UNH (9/27), Yale (10/11), Holy
Cross (Homecoming, 8/18), Harvard (11/1), and Brown
(11/15).

The Indians will be televised both regionally and nationally in seven of their contests this season with two games on
NESN and one on Versus, a national broadcast. This is very
exciting for Dartmouth alumni around the country who will
be able to watch their beloved Indians, and for students too
hungover to make it out of their dormrooms for the three
games that will be televised here in Hanover.

Dartmouth has high aspirations for this season and
will capitalize on returning experience and a high level of
incoming talent in the class of 2012. The freshman class

includes some of the best talent in the Ivy League and you
can expect to see many of them on the field this fall.

Key returners for the Indians on offense are wide
receivers Eric Paul and Phil Galligan, quarterbacks Alex
Jenny and Tim McManus, running back Milan Williams, and
offensive lineman Alex Rapp, Alex Toth, and Alex Wodka.
On defense, there are linebackers Joe Battaglia, Andrew
Dete and Zech Glaize, defensive linemen Rehan Muttalib,
Max Copello, Malcolm Freberg, and Charles Bay, and in
the secondary safety, Ian Wilson.

Coach Teevens is entering his fourth year at Dartmouth
and his strategic recruiting, hard work ethic, and solid coaching staff will begin to reap the benefits of the hard work that
has been driven into this program. Dartmouth has a rich
tradition in football and this year marks the twelfth year
without an Ivy League championship; after being chosen
seventh out of eight in this years coaches poll, the Indians
look to turn some heads and make some people wonder who
these boys are from the backwoods of New Hampshire?

I suggest you all make it out to Memorial Field this fall
and watch your Indians fight in the trenches with the best
the Ivy League has to offer; you might just be pleasantly
surprised.
n

Page  The Dartmouth Review September 19, 2008

Dartmouth’s Best Professors...
John Rassias
French

Russell Hughes
Chemistry

Rassias is perhaps Dartmouth’s most famous professor. His innovative theories on the teaching of foreign
languages led to Dartmouth’s LSA programs, drill sessions, and language lab. His teaching style verges on
the outrageous. In class, he dresses up as Montesquieu,
throws raw meat around, breaks eggs on students’ heads,
and rips his shirt off—all in the line of teaching. Rassias’s
vivid instruction is something no Dartmouth student
should forgo, though a Rassias-taught class is now a rare
delicacy.


Hughes sings, dances, and blows things up in class—all
in the name of teaching organic chemistry. It’s obvious
that Hughes loves teaching: he’s always available for consultation and often stops by labs to help students. While
orgo is often feared, Hughes’s crisp (and often comic)
explanations make the subject entertaining and fun. While
he is notorious for using every X-hour and assigning a
heavy workload, students often find themselves inspired
to delve headlong into the intimidating material thanks
to Hughes’s obvious passion for the subject.

P. David Lagomarsino
History

Lucas Swaine
Government


Perhaps the best professor in a department full of
gems, Lagomarsino has won practically every award the
College offers for teaching. Imperial Spain is his forte, but
he has a thorough knowledge of early modern Europe and
doesn’t hestitate to share it with his students. Not afraid
to buck the trends of political correctness or conventional
wisdom, he teaches that the Inquisition was more just than
most judicial procedures of its time. Even if you’re not a
major, Lagomarsino is not to be missed.

Paul Christesen
Classics


One of the most popular in the department, and a
Dartmouth alumnus to boot, Professor Christesen is also
the most popular adviser to classics majors. And his lectures
provide compelling evidence for the importance of classics;
he has a firm grasp on the value of understanding Western
Civilization’s development. Christesen is a wise choice for
beginning or continuing your study of classics. Listening
to his lectures, one gets the impression that Christesen
has tailored his lectures for challenging and interesting
the specifically undergraduate mind. (We mean that in a
good way.)

James Tatum — Classics


Even if you can’t fit a class with Professor Tatum into your
schedule, The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from
the Iliad to Vietnam—published by the University of Chicago
Press—is a must-read. Tatum is an expert on Apuleius and
a sophisticated teacher. He uses Greek call-and-response
to keep his classes awake, attentive, and involved.

but essential period in Western history. He is amazingly
accessible to students, even in his large lecture classes, and
is very helpful and welcoming during office hours. He gives
thoughtful, detailed feedback on papers and assignments,
and is quick to refer students to appropriate sources and
references on their assignments. Plus, he’s a great lecturer
with an obvious passion for his subject.

Ehud Benor — Religion

Douglas Irwin — Economics


Professor Benor takes the time and risk to question
deeply held beliefs and assumptions about his very own
discipline. And best of all, students are invited to challenge
his own theories. He’s better known for his Judaism classes.
He’s an encyclopedia of classical, medieval, and modern
Judaism, and his lectures on the rabbinic revolution and
mysticism are masterful.

Donald Pease — English


Pease is a leading Americanist and a highly respected
scholar in the field of American Studies. His dense lecture style
takes some getting used to, but if you’re able to get beneath
his jargon there’s something deep and profound to be had.

Dale Eickelman — Anthropology


Eickelman’s readings are carefully chosen, and classroom discussion borders on genius. Professor Eickelman
squeezes the best work from his students; given the depth
and breadth of the material he covers, asking any less would
be a waste of his and students’ time.

Timothy Pulju — Linguistics


One of the best-reviewed profs at Dartmouth, Pulju
combines an exceptional lecturing style with a genuine
committment to help individual undergraduates one-on-one.
Known for his deadpan sense of humor and skill at engaging all the students even in large lecture classes through
question-and-answer, Pulju turns what can occasionally be
a dry subject into something thoroughly entertaining.

Walter Simons — History


Professor Simons is the department’s resident medievalist, a man quietly passionate about a misunderstood


After the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Irwin took to
the pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend WTO trade
policies and criticize President Clinton for “caving in to
pressure from labor interests.” Irwin is an unqualified expert
and an excellent teacher.

Samuel Velez — Biology


Velez is an outstanding professor in a department not
always recognized for its teaching. His exams are onerous
and require extremely thorough knowledge of the topic,
but his animated lectures and easy accessibility to students
make it all worthwhile. Velez explains the brain’s foundations through analogy, story, case study—whatever is needed
to transmit the information to his students. His “Crayfish
Experience” in Biology 34 is not to be missed.

Barbara Will — English


Unlike many of her colleagues in the English department, Professor Will provides a savvy, critical analysis of
postmodern literature without getting bogged down in the
jargon of literary theory. Her teaching style is refreshingly
straightforward, and she has the rare talent of making dullseeming topics interesting.

Allen Koop — History


A gifted and witty lecturer, Professor Koop teaches
modern European history and the history of the American health care system. At the beginning of his History
65: Modern Europe: The Twentieth Century, he says he
aims to make it one of the three best courses you take at
Dartmouth. You should take him up on that. Possessing a
keen interest in cultural history, Koop is sui generis as a
guide through history’s bloodiest century.


A rockstar in an already strong department, Swaine’s
classes on political philosophy make the subject dynamic
and relevant. His lectures take a class or two to get used
to, as does Swaine’s personality, which is, to say the least,
eccentric, but one quickly converts to a fan. There’s a
certain mischevious character to his class that’s greatly
reinforced by his opening comments on topics like the
latest episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Beware though,
Swaine makes heavy use of John Rawls in his Liberalism
and Its Critics (a must take), and no one likes Rawls.

Marlene Heck
Art History


Professor Heck is one of Dartmouth’s most beloved
professors. Her classes in the Art History department
stand out for their ability to contextualize art, architecture, history, and culture in their time, weaving each
together to give a complete picture. Her class on American Architecture is a must take, as is her Writing 5 class
on the founding fathers. Professor Heck’s passions for
the American founding, Thomas Jefferson, and colonial
architecture are infectious. A Fascinating individual both
inside and outside the classroom, with classes and office
hours always filled to capacity, Professor Heck and her art
history classes will change the way you look at the world.

Meir Kohn — Economics


Something of a legend in the Dartmouth Econ
Department (a commonly traded tale—of questionable
veracity—notes that an “A” in Kohn’s class translates into
an instant job offer on Wall Street), Kohn is the maestro
of Econ 26, a.k.a. “Money for Dummies.” He is one of
the most feared professors at Dartmouth, and his classes,
conducted in an intense Socratic question-and-answer
format, force students to analyze economic questions at a
level above simply parroting back textbook information.

Devin Balkcom — Computer Science


Balkcom, in addition to teaching undergraduate CS,
directs the Dartmouth Robotics Lab and recently received
a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award
from the National Science Foundation. Balkcom epitomizes the balance between research and instruction that
Dartmouth profs should strive for.

Larry Crocker — Philosophy


A former lawyer and law school professor, Professor
Crocker has one of the sharpest minds of any professor
at Dartmouth. His Philosophy of Law and Ethical Theory
classes are engaging, penetrating, and among the most
intellectually rigorous courses you can take at Dartmouth.

Roger Ulrich — Classics


Professor Ulrich does not suffer fools gladly, so do not
come to his course unprepared. But for the intellectually
alert, the professor’s summer-taught Classical Mythology
class—or “story telling for sophomores”—is a must take. His
responsiveness to students and dry humor make his classes
a delight.

Amanda Loud — Latin


Professor Loud teaches Latin 1 and 3 at the College,
and has a way of making a very difficult subject remarkably accessible. Dynamic, fun, and engaging, she not only
teaches the fundamentals of Latin grammar clearly, but
also inserts Roman history lessons into her syllabus to spice
things up.

September 19, 2008 The Dartmouth Review Page 

...and Dartmouth’s Worst
Lynda Boose
English

Jesse Giummo
Economics


How Professor Boose managed to secure a position at Dartmouth is astounding. Nothing good can
be said about this lady. She left her English 5 class
to sit through more than four weeks of soap operas
in place of class lectures. She frequently cancels
class with little warning; she once missed class for a
whole week because of a toothache. Avoid this nutty
professor by any means necessary.


A relative new comer to Dartmouth, this professor
has quickly established himself as the scourge of the
Economics department. Incapable of handling anything
except the introductory courses of Econ 1 and Econ 10,
Giummo succeeds spectacularly at making dry material
incoherent. Mind you he doesn’t do this out of malice,
but an inability to compose a lecture; he will frequently
digress in a problem. He does post all of his past exams
on Blackboard, but one shouldn’t be confident that that
will help, as he changes his testing style every term. Finally, it’s almost impossible to avoid noticing his uncanny
likeness to Norm Macdonald.

Ellen Rockmore
Writing


Writing 5 classes typically don’t attract the most
stellar of profs, and Ellen Rockmore is no exception.
She grades papers arbitrarily, lackadaisically assigning a student the same grades throughout the term,
whether they have improved their writing or not.
But improving her students writing skills was never
Professor Rockmore’s goal; opining endlessly in class,
rather, is her paramount objective. This woman is dangerously underqualified to teach, and literally pushes
students out of her office hours when they press her
about their writing skills and improvements.

Marysa Navarro
History

A dubious distinction, this professor was featured
in the very first issue of The Dartmouth Review—over
twenty-five years ago. She is still causing problems on
the Dartmouth campus today. She is perhaps the most
notoriously biased grader in Dartmouth’s history and a
feminist reactionary to the bone.

Susan Blader
Chinese

Roger Sloboda
Biology


Professor Sloboda, who teaches in the biology department, “is so bad that I changed my major,” one student
reports. He’s known for his meandering lectures, telling
students the opposite of what he means, and emphasizing
unimportant details in class; many leave his classroom
dazed or frustrated. Talk about confusing: many students
in his class learn the basics of Cell Biology by appealing to
the class’s TA rather than stopping by Professor Sloboda’s
office hours. His team taught Bio 11 class (The Science
of Life) has been called the worst class at Dartmouth.

Brenda Silver — English


An avid feminist critic, Professor Silver reads literature
with the firm belief that anything longer than it is round
must be a phallus. Silver is addicted to anything anti-male
and holds androgyny to be the human ideal. If you enjoy
listening to the classics of Western culture being destroyed by
feminist deconstruction, then you will love her lectures.

Ronald Edsforth — MALS


Professor Edsforth ranks among Dartmouth’s most
notorious professors. He’s managed to teach here for over
a decade without getting tenure, hanging on to a job only
through the much-maligned MALS program. It’s little
wonder why, really, considering that Edsforth’s particular
brand of scholarship is light on disinterested inquiry but
heavy on rhetoric worthy of the Daily Worker. Students
misfortunate enough to enroll in his War and Peace class
last spring learned little about war; some about the evils of
American car companies; much about about castle-in-thesky theories for world government.

Owen Dearricott — Mathematics


Easily the most inarticulate and unhelpful member of
the otherwise highly competent Mathematics department,
Dearricott makes already difficult topics (Multivariable
Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations) absolutely
incomprehensible. He invests little to no time in preparation for his classes, lectures straight from the book, and
is extremely unapproachable outside of class. Avoid at all
costs.

Mathilde Sitbon — History


Madame Sitbon teaches the broadly-titled “French
Language and Culture” class on the French FSP in Paris.
An unapologetic socialist, she makes no effort to leave her
opinions at the door when she comes into the classroom.
Always quick to criticize American politics and culture,
she subscribes to the popular opinion that “the French
way is the right way” and isn’t afraid to share it. Needless
to say, Mme. Sitbon plays favorites like it’s her job; men

—Circa 1970s—

and anyone she perceives to be privileged inevitably come
out on the short end of this arrangement. Unfortunately,
because Sitbon teaches on the FSP during all three terms,
any student traveling to Paris must take her class.


A generation ago, when Mao ran China, it wasn’t
as necessary to have a qualified Chinese instructor— it
was a more self-motivational department—this was
when Dartmouth hired Blader. As a language instructor she’s impossibly dense; any aspiring student should
mind to take Chinese 1, 2, and 3 with Rudelson. Her
Chinese 10 course, a prerequiste for the Beijing FSP,
focuses mainly on ancient China and whatever esoteric
subject she may be researching this term, as opposed
to any relevant topic that may prepare students for
their trip abroad. Take Rudelson.

Dartmouth’s Worst Professor
Shelby Grantham — English

Tanalis Padilla — History


One tasty tidbit: Padilla made her students come to an
x-hour once to watch a movie extolling the virtues of the
Zapatista terrorists who were fighting against the global capitalist conspiracy and the evil Mexican central government.
The video featured the profound commentary of the angry
bandmembers from Rage Against the Machine, countless
crackpot academics, and even featured the indomitable, copkilling Mumia Abu-Jamal. Take her classes only if you want
to hear rants against US imperialism in Latin America.

Ann Bumpus — Philosophy


Bumpus is a case study on how not to use PowerPoint. Her
“lecture” consists of progressing through slide after slide, each
with a long quotation. At times it seems as if she hasn’t prepared
anything beforehand, as she pauses for minutes on end, combing
through a pile of papers. She’s a nice enough woman and gives
very generous marks, but unless boredom is your bag, keep
away.

Evelyn Gick — Economics, Gender Studies


Professor Gick’s Women and Genders Studies 30 class,
Economics of the Fashion Industry, is one of the worst
classes Dartmouth offers. Professor Gick lacks communication skills and manages to give students false information
in classes which are difficult enough, like Introduction to
Economics. Though an interesting scholar on F.A Hayek,
her teaching abilities leave much to be desired.

Ioana Chitoran — Lingusitics


Though a nice woman, Professor Chitoran is a disorganized lecturer and is constantly late to either class or office
hours. In her Introduction to Linguistics class, she makes
no effort to make the material interesting, and students
ultimately fail to take away anything meaningful from the


A self-described “recovering racist” who makes
her classes into an airing of grievances rather than a
study of literature because she “can’t read male authors
anymore,” Grantham injects her writing courses with
dogmatic liberalism. Notorious for declaring Band-Aids
“racist” because of their color, she terrorizes those
who disagree with her and fills her class with rants
that verge on insanity (the plight of the lobsters at the
Co-Op apparently keeps her from sleeping at night).
If you find yourself unlucky enough to be assigned to
her Writing 5 section, bolt for the door.

class. For those looking to fulfill the QDS distrib requirement, look elsewhere.

Peter Tse — Pyschology


Professor Tse began one of his classes, “this material will
be painful and boring.” Not a promising start. Beyond his
antipathy to the material he teaches, Professor Tse makes
no effort to make the subject he teaches clear or interesting to the students taking his class. If you take Psychology
10 (Statistics) with Professor Tse, make sure to read the
textbook, which is your best bet to learn the material.

Page  The Dartmouth Review September 19, 2008

Courses of Note

Editor’s Note: None of the following courses has a
prerequisite. We provide here course reviews of a few of the
introductory courses you are likely to consider, and a few
smaller, upper-level courses that have met with consistently
excellent reviews over the past few years. They are truly
some of Dartmouth’s best.

Introductory Courses
ART HISTORY 1: Intro. to History of Art I
ART HISTORY 2: Intro. to History of Art II

Together these courses survey the entire history of
art, from ancient Egyptian and Greek artwork through
the post-modernists Georgia O’Keefe and Salvador Dali.
Architecture, sculpture, the graphic arts, and painting are
all studied. While the two courses sometimes include dry
lectures and innumerable slides to memorize, they foster
an appreciation of Western civilization’s artistic legacy and
its relation to our history.

in ten weeks. The teaching reminds you of a tenth-grade
social studies course.

That said, if you do end up taking these courses, try
taking History 2 with Butler, who is one of Dartmouth’s
best young professors.
HISTORY 3: Europe to 1715
HISTORY 4: Europe since 1715

Although the professors who generally teach European
History classes tend to be very good, these, too, are courses
to be avoided. They move too fast and don’t allow for any
real depth of study.
HUMANITIES 1 & 2: The Classical Tradition

For anyone interested in receiving a jump-start course
in Western civilization, look no further. Humanities presents the great literature and philosophy of the ages as a
coherent whole. The courses trace the evolution of human

CHEMISTRY 5: General Chemistry
CHEMISTRY 6: General Chemistry

Overzealous pre-meds will likely leap into
these courses freshman fall; their professional
aspirations will be crushed in a quagmire of slowmoving, tedious lectures and labs. The classes have
a tendency to go too slowly when reviewing high
school chemistry topics, then too quickly when
introducing new material. The professoriate is a
revolving door of the chemistry staff. If you’re
not a biology or chemistry major, avoid these
classes.
CLASSICS 1:
Antiquity Today: An Introduction to
Classical Studies

Essentially an anthropological survey of the
ancient world, this course will introduce you to
the literature, history, art, and culture of the
two major, pagan currents flowing into Western
culture: Greece and Rome. In the hands of Paul
Christesen, with whom you should take it, this
course feels much smaller than it is due to his
careful attention to individual student needs.
CLASSICS 5:
The Heroic Vision: Epics of Greece &
Rome

This course is a survey of some of the “best
known and most influential works to survive from
the ancient world.” Students study Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as Lucretius’s De Rarum Natura.
These works serve as the fountainhead from which
our culture’s works of literature have emerged.
Students will find knowledge of the classics essential toward
understanding the broad span of Western literature and the
ultimate question of life: “How should I live?”
GOV’T 3: The American Political System
GOV’T 4: Comparative Gov’t and Politics
GOV’T 6: Political Ideas

Together, these three courses serve as prerequisites for
the Government major, the most popular major at Dartmouth. Yet non-majors can take these introductory courses
as well. Few students pass through freshman year without
taking at least one, and that’s the only problem. They tend
to be basic, and the classes are large.

Government 3 (American Government) often reads like
a digest of the last year’s worth of Newsweek—it’s hopelessly
simple. Winters in particular should be avoided. Government
5 can be very good or very bad—take it with Brooks.

Government 4 is generally a dreadful class. If taught
by Professor Sa’adah­—who has a disturbing penchant for
seeing plagiarism wherever she turns­—the class is difficult
and boring.

Government 6 is an important class in which you read
all the fundamentals of political philosophy. Though it is a
lot of work, the class can be satisfying if you have a good
professor.
HISTORY 1: The United States, 1763-1877
HISTORY 2: The United States since 1877

This is another set of courses that you should not take
unless you are required to do so for your major. American
History is simply too complex a subject to breeze through

Recommended
Upper-Level Courses
ENGLISH 24: Shakespeare I
This class studies ten of his plays, spanning comedies,
tragedies, histories, and romances. Since the retirement
of Professor Saccio, Dartmouth has been without an endowed chair in Shakespeare studies.
ENGLISH 28: Milton
While Professor Luxon sometimes allows his political
leanings to get in the way of his scholarship, he’s extremely
knowledgeable, and the subject matter makes the course
indispensable.
GERMAN 42: Topics in German
Civilization

This class is one of the best at Dartmouth.
The readings are generally interesting and the
professors are almost always exceptional. The
German department as a whole is one of the best
departments here.
GERMAN 44: The Faust Tradition

Take this course with Professor Shookman,
the department’s Goethe expert who won a prize
a few years ago for the best teacher at Dartmouth.
This survey in translation will cover works by
Marlowe, Goethe, Mann, and Bulgakov.
HISTORY 43: European Cultural and
Intellectual History, 400-1300
Medieval history isn’t usually most people’s
cup of tea, but it’s not hard to maintain interest
in the subject when Professor Simons is teaching. Besides, reading Augustine, Abelard, and St.
Thomas of Aquinas makes the class worthwhile,
regardless of the professor.
HISTORY 65: Modern Europe:
The Twentieth Century
Koop is more of a storyteller than a lecturer,
and in History 65 he tells one of history’s most
interesting stories. Most people know the general
history that this class covers, but Koop humanizes
much of it and has a deep understanding for the
characters and, more importantly, ideologies of
the time.
Don’t take this class if you want a professor
who solicits much input, Koop has his formula
down and he sticks to it. However if you have to
take one History class, this is the one.

thought from classical times (Plato, Virgil, Homer) to the
Renaissance (Dante, Milton) through to the modern era
(Mann, Faulkner). No other “Great Books” course exists at
Dartmouth. Take advantage of these courses if you can. The
English 5 requirement sometimes precludes its availability
to freshmen.
PHILOSOPHY 1: Introduction to Philosophy

This class is a poor introduction to philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline that demands involved study of the central
authors; a survey class like this one simply can’t provide
it. Philosophy 3 is a more interesting introductory course,
because its topic (Logic) is demonstrably more narrow.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Bernard Gert, and James
Moor are among the very best scholars in their fields, and
among Dartmouth’s best professors in any field. Any class
with any of them is a tremendous experience.
RELIGION 1: Patterns of Religious Experience

The introduction to the intellectual study of religion
teaches the major tenets of five religions: Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism.

In this class, as in most others at Dartmouth, thorough
reading and class attendance are the ways to succeed.
Although it is an introductory course, many senior and
junior majors enroll and can make the class an intimidating
atmosphere for freshmen.

The Religion Department has a group of inspired and
thoughtfully reflective scholars. Kevin Reinhardt stands out
even in this group.

ITALIAN IN TRANSLATION 33: Dante

Since most of us cannot read The Divine Comedy in
its original Italian, this course is a must for anyone who
wishes to be exposed to one of the most astounding and
thought-provoking poets of all time.
MUSIC 6: History of Western Art Music

This course, “An Introduction to Western Art Music,”
emphasizes music of the past 300 years in an examination
of selected masterworks. Like Art History, this fascinating
course provides students with an excellent view of our
culture through the lens of an art. “No previous knowledge
of music is assumed,” says the ORC.
MUSIC 37: Opera

Opera is a crucial element of Western culture, and
Professor Swayne traces its history from Monteverdi
to modernism in an engaging fashion. Most professors
butcher technology in the classroom, but Swayne uses it
par excellence to enrich his course. Don’t expect to breeze
through this course, though—Swayne’s courses demand a
detailed knowledge of scores and libretti. No prerequistes
are required, however.
RUSSIAN 36: Tolstoy and the Problem of Death

Loseff is an acclaimed biographer of his late friend
Joseph Brodsky and an excellent guide to the major novels
of Leo Tolstoy, one of the most fascinating novelists of
modern times. Often taught during the summer, this is
an enthralling course.

September 19, 2008 The Dartmouth Review Page 

A Western Culture Primer
By Chien Wen Kung

Notwithstanding Philip Larkin’s remark in “A Study
of Reading Habits” that “books are a load of crap,” reading can in fact be something “worth ruining my eyes” for,
to quote the same poem again. (Okay, maybe not—that
argument is for another time.) But while not all books are
a load of crap—Larkin’s protagonist directs his ire at cheap
bestsellers—some books are certainly better than others.
You’d expect to read such books here at Dartmouth, and
indeed you probably will. Yet a great number of very good
books, non-fiction in particular, do not find their way into
college syllabi. They simply do not square with the reigning
ideologies of the day, and indeed may be downright hostile
to them (as many of the books listed here in fact are). For
that reason alone they are worth reading. These books are
more than just a critique of contemporary pieties, and it is
this other side of them we address.

The focus of this article will be on the affirmative value
of three books—The Closing of the American Mind, The
Western Canon, and From Dawn to Decadence —to liberal
education.

The late Allan Bloom subtitled his 1987 bestseller, The
Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Learning Has
Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s
Students. Like his mentor Leo Strauss, Bloom believed that
liberal democracy, far from being self-perpetuating, was in
fact a precious and fragile thing, subject to dangers within
and without.

Accordingly, the purpose of liberal education in Bloom’s
view was to make the individual aware of the dangers to
democracy, mostly internal, but—as we are finding out
lately—also external. Chief among the former was, according to Bloom, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, enslavement
to public opinion. The claim of democracy, writes Bloom,
“is that every man decides for himself” and that all men
are somehow equal. But this “makes it difficult to resist the
collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the
majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics,
should hold sway.” This, as Socrates is wont to point out in
Book VIII of The Republic, is nothing less than a prescription
for tyranny. Accordingly, the aim of liberal education is to
“free oneself from public guidance and find resources for
guidance from within,” such that “the student’s whole life
be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his
action, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment
be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation.” So
much for the view that Bloom was a reactionary. (“Radical
conservative” is perhaps a more appropriate, paradoxical
epithet.)

Bloom did not mean that we should trust our instincts and
celebrate the self, for that would be an invitation to narcissism.
What he meant was that liberal education should seek, in
the Platonic sense, to turn the soul, intrinsically good, from
that which is “mingled with darkness, that which is coming
into being and passing away,” to “that on which truth and
being are shining.” In practice, this involves coming to terms
with matters of permanent concern. Socrates’s discourses
on justice, free will, human nature, truth, and the good, in
other words, must be pursued—passionately—above and
beyond the academic disciplines, even as they are pursued
within them. Otherwise the “democracy of the disciplines”
(as Bloom calls the bewildering array of courses available to
college students today), lacking metaphysical glue, becomes
anarchical.

So, philosophy matters; what else does? We must
descend from metaphysics for the time being. Bloom
mentions in passing that “the only serious solution is the
one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great
Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts.” Yet for some
reason, Bloom endorses this approach with a great deal of
equivocation. On the one hand, he acknowledges that the
Great Books excite and satisfy students like nothing else by
raising the sort of big questions liberal education demands
of us. On the other hand, he warns that the Great Books are
easily fetishized and turned into a cult that “encourages an
autodidact’s self-assurance without competence.” We don’t
want to end up like Elizabeth Bennet’s younger sister Mary
after all.

No such restraint informs the pages of Harold Bloom’s
Western Canon, perhaps the foremost apologia for the
Western literary tradition today. Going from one Bloom

Mr. Kung graduated summa cum laude from the College
in 2004 and majored in History and English.

to another (the two are not related, as Harold is wont to
point out) might initially seem a natural progression, given
that both excoriate in their books those who shun the Great
Books in favor of obtuse postmodern theories. However,
besides sharing a contempt for Deconstruction, academic
feminism, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, et al., the two
Blooms are actually quite dissimilar. Allan Bloom, as we’ve
noted, saw the Great Books as possessing a culturally-useful
function, which is the ability to educate students in the ways
of democracy. Harold Bloom would accuse his namesake
of “Platonic moralism.” Reading deeply in the Canon, he
believes, “will not make one a better or a worse person, a
more useful or more harmful citizen.” Shakespeare, Dante,
Chaucer, Milton, Tolstoy, Austen, and Joyce (a few of the
authors he discusses) are ends in themselves, aesthetic
objects to be marveled at for their “mastery of figurative
language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.” We read them solely to “augment one’s
own growing inner self.” Self, not soul, is the byword here,

could be conceived of as cultural: everything from music to
religion to sport might be used to depict the past. Nowhere
is this idea more vividly illustrated than in Barzun’s latest
book, From Dawn to Decadence, an 800-page survey of
“art and thought, manners, morals, and religion” from the
Reformation to the present day. Within it you will encounter
Charles V of Spain but also Christina of Sweden; Goethe
and Shakespeare, but also Dorothy Sayers and George
Bernard Shaw; Montaigne and Bacon, but also Walter
Bagehot and Robert Burton. Find out why Luther and not
Leonardo was more of a “Renaissance Man”; why Rousseau
neither invented nor idealized the noble savage; why the
term “Man” is not just politically incorrect but historically
accurate; how the Romantics invented Shakespeare; and
just what is meant by that loaded word, “decadence.” Walt
Whitman said of himself, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
The same might be said of this book.

Yes, the Romantics invented Shakespeare. Harold
Bloom may see him as a kind of secular god, “a spirit that

—David’s “The Death of Socrates”—
the latter having to do with Platonic metaphysics, the former
referring to what makes us individuals.

Contrary to Oblonsky’s quip in Anna Karenina that “The
aim of civilization is to enable us to get enjoyment out of
everything,” enlightened hedonism cannot be the be all and
end all of liberal education. This is not to disparage reading
for enjoyment’s sake—who can deny the pleasures of curling up in bed with a volume of Proust?—merely to note,
pragmatically, the difficulties that would arise if we made
Harold Bloom’s idea of reading central to liberal education.
Objective standards do not exist for us to estimate the value
of Shakespeare—Bloom’s favorite author—to one’s “inner
self.” And is Bloom right in asserting that only the aesthetic
value of literature matters? What would he make then of a
book like Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, or for that matter, Plato’s Republic? (Both are on
the recommended reading list at the back of the book).
Sure, you can read Gibbon and Plato only for their beautiful prose, but then you’d miss out on their historical and
philosophical concerns.

Because he spends all his time attacking postmodern
theorists for their “flight from the aesthetic,” Harold Bloom
in the end does not really say why he regards Allan Bloom’s
approach to the Great Books as flawed. He can’t. The latter
Bloom isn’t hostile towards the aesthetic just because he
mentions Shakespeare in relation to the demands of liberal
democracy. We might even see them as sharing similar
metaphysics. Both after all posit that values—philosophical
or literary—exist beyond time and space, as Plato would
have it. Here is where their weakness lies. Absent from
each book is an awareness of history. When I say this, I
don’t mean that Plato’s or Shakespeare’s concerns aren’t our
concerns because they lived in the past, nor that individual
genius is merely the product of social forces. I mean that
studying the past strengthens rather than weakens literature
and philosophy by reminding us that ideas have causes and
conditions—as well as consequences.

Early on in his life, the historian Jacques Barzun came
to a similar realization as the one above. History, he realized,

permeates everywhere, that cannot be confined,” but as
Barzun points out, not everyone at every point in time held
the Bard in such esteem. There are, Barzun notes, two
Shakespeares. One is the 16th-century playwright whom
Ben Jonson admired and criticized in equal measure. The
other is the Shakespeare apotheosized two centuries after
his death by German and English Romantics, and who remains exalted today by the likes of Harold Bloom (whose
specialty happens to be Romanticism). A man acutely aware
of “the whirligig of taste”—to modify a phrase from Twelfth
Night—cannot allow Bardolatry to pass without mentioning
that men like Pepys, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Tolstoy, T. S.
Eliot, and Yeats all considered Shakespeare far less than
superhuman.

The point of this example is not to diminish Shakespeare’s greatness—Barzun is very much an admirer of
Shakespeare—but to point out how our notions of the way
things are may not be as secure as they seem. Allan Bloom
advocated philosophy as the means towards freeing the self
from public guidance and enabling it to find guidance from
within. Such freedom cannot come from philosophy alone.
How do we explain the fatuousness of the slogan “Bush =
Hitler” without knowing about the past? History in this
manner supplies material against which we compare present situations and judge them relatively. To do so is not to
succumb to postmodern nihilism. A wise and learned man
once said, “The complexity of things, the plurality of minds
and wills, and the uncertainty of outcomes form the grounds
for keeping one’s outcomes ever subject to revision.” (The
words are those of Montaigne.)

We needn’t agree with Allan Bloom’s Platonism or
Harold Bloom’s Bardolatry to appreciate the influence Plato
and Shakespeare have on Western thought. We needn’t
trust Jacques Barzun’s unorthodox pronouncements on
Rousseau and Luther to enlarge our understanding of how
ideas and individuals interact. Challenging conventional
wisdom, as their books do, is valuable. But perhaps there
is even greater value in becoming one who can challenge
conventional wisdom, as these books teach.
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